In 1950, Chet Cunningham was drafted in the Army. After nine months in Japan Cunningham went to the front lines of the war in Korea. He participated in two battles and numerous line-crossing and prisoner patrols. Assigned to a heavy weapons company he served as an 81 mm mortar gunner, squad leader, and section leader. His service earned him the Combat Infantryman's Badge. After two years of service he was discharged in the rank of sergeant.

Chet Cunningham’s first novel was published in 1968.  Since then he has written over 300 books including the Seal Team Seven Series under the name of Keith Douglass.  His works include The Specialists: Nuke Down; The Specialists: Deadly Strike; The Frogmen of World War II: An Oral History of the U.S. Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams; Cheyenne Blood Storm; Beloved Rebel; Blood on the Strip; and, Hell Wouldn't Stop: An Oral History of the Battle of Wake Island.

According to the book description of The Specialists: Nuke Down, “ They are the most talented -- and dangerous -- fighting force ever assembled, drawn from elite ranks of the FBI, the CIA, the Navy Seals, Britain MI-6, and Israel's Mossad. Handpicked by a reclusive billionaire-patriot, trained in the latest weapons, schooled in all forms of close combat. When a raid on an Iraqi terrorist nest uncovers a list of American targets, the Specialists need answers fast. Is the list real? Which targets will be threatened first? And who's the mastermind behind it all?

The Specialists have three chief suspect: the notorious Osama bin Laden; the Iranian Abdel Salim, known as the Muslim Assassin; and a shadowy figure who calls himself the Scimitar -- all masters of disguise whose exploits have brought destruction and death to untold innocents.  Now the Specialists must stop the most ambitious act of terror yet: the theft of a nuclear bomb and its detonation somewhere within the United States. The Specialists' one slim hope lies in identifying a double-crossing terrorist who plans to sell renegade nukes to the highest bidder -- or the world will face its first act of nuclear terror ... and a new resign of bloodshed impossible to stop.”

According to the book description of The Frogmen of World War II: An Oral History of the U.S. Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams, “As countless battlefronts in the Pacific, African, and European theaters called for direct amphibious assaults against islands and beachheads, a small corps of exceptionally skilled fighting men was formed -- the U.S. Navy underwater warriors. Beginning in 1943, these men undertook never-before-attempted missions ranging from eye-to-eye recon of enemy-held positions to staging the demolition of shoreline obstacles and clearing the way for landing craft. Here, in their own words, are the true stories of these aquatic commandos, whose daring exploits and bravery would pave the way for thousands of American fighting men around the globe -- and whose recolitionary training and fighting methods would evolve into the modern specail forces known as the Navy SEALs.”

According to the book description of Hell Wouldn't Stop: An Oral History of the Battle of Wake Island, “In this gritty, poignant, often disturbing oral chronicle of one of the first and most tragic military engagements in World War II, Chet Cunningham gives the gallant U.S. defenders of Wake Island—among them his older brother, Kenneth, then a private in the Marines—their long-overlooked due. For Kenneth Cunningham, a serviceman in the defense battalion stationed on Wake Island, World War II began on December 8, 1941, just five hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It ended on December 23. That day the Marines on Wake Island—their twelve Wildcat fighter planes lost, their forces diminished—faced an overwhelming enemy invasion, with the Japanese arriving in so many ships that, as one eyewitness put it, they could have walked from one to the other on the open sea. Private Cunningham and his fellow Marines fought intrepidly, until their commanding officers ordered them to surrender. Their term in hell, though, had just begun. When the Marines laid down their arms they were stripped naked. With their hands bound, they sat naked in the hot sun all day; at night they shivered in the cold. They suffered endless days at sea jammed in the holds of ships that took them to prison camps in China and Japan. Forty-four months later, liberated at last, they would return home unheralded and largely forgotten. Their often horrific, frequently heroic story now stands recorded, for the most part in the words of the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and civilian personnel who were there, as well as of their wives and widows, in startling, unforgettable detail. Eight pages of black-and-white photographs add to this gripping reconstruction of the sixteen-day battle for Wake Island and its aftermath.”